This morning I did what I do on Mondays and walked over to a local coffee shop that is almost always filled with white men in their fifties complaining to other white men in their fifties about things that will never concern me (topics overheard today: boats, sales data).

I did what I had to do, and on my way home I could hear this really strange chirping and screaming noise. I stopped. I looked around. I saw a red tailed hawk cruising around over the parking lot that I was walking through, but I knew that squeaky chirp wasn’t the hawk.

I stood around a while. The hawk landed.

I watched it for a while. It seemed infinitely disinterested in the world. It looked around. I walked toward it and it stared at me for a moment. The noise kept happening.

Then the yelling bird appeared. It hopped around and yelled at the hawk, and the hawk proceeded to give NOT A SINGLE FUCK IN THE ENTIRE WORLD. At one point the bird was sitting less than six inches away from the hawk screaming at him and the hawk just looked at the ground.

The state of nature; the war of all against all. The small bird yells at a hawk, who presumably just wants to eat some sweet urban mice and rats without being bothered. The bird will have none of that.

If I were a political philosopher in the 18th century I would draw some life lesson from this, but I’m not, so I won’t. I just liked watching these animals have a minor disagreement.

2 Responses to Trouble in the Neighborhood

Birder’s son here. Usually this situation emerges because the red-tailed hawk recently killed the yelling bird’s child. The hawk is about as threatened by the smaller yelling bird as a drone operator is by a crying mother in Yemen, so neither are particularly bothered. Probably more than a “minor disagreement”.

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This is a blog about video games, comic books, film, and philosophy. It is mostly research-oriented stuff. The art in the current header is from Prophet #29. The blog icon was made by Tara Ogaick.